US senator raises alarm on overseas government spying through Apple and Google push notifications

A hot potato: Are foreign governments spying on you via push notifications supplied via Apple and Google? US Senator Ron Wyden says it sincerely does happen, and Apple has in view that confirmed the practice. It seems that the Department of Justice were preventing the agencies from revealing details of the system.

Wyden despatched a letter to the DoJ on Wednesday urging the department to allow Apple and Google to inform the general public about demands for cellphone app notifications.

The senator writes that his office acquired a tip in 2022 that authorities companies in overseas countries were annoying push notification statistics from the two tech giants. Wyden's group of workers has been investigating the top for the past yr, which concerned contacting Google and Apple. The groups stated facts approximately the exercise become restrained from public launch via the authorities.

Push notifications cowl a huge range of makes use of, from letting you realize approximately new messages or updates to breaking information and in-app activities. Wyden says most users are unaware that they bypass through Apple's and Google's servers instead of coming at once from an app. The information the groups get hold of include metadata detailing which app received a notification and while, as well as the telephone related to the account. They might also receive unencrypted content that could include the text a person sees in an app notification.

Wyden says that Apple and Google may be "secretly forced via governments to hand over this facts," and have to be accredited to be obvious about the demands they acquire, particularly from overseas governments. He called on the Justice Department to repeal or regulate any guidelines that obstruct this transparency.

Apple has confirmed that the federal authorities prohibited the employer from sharing any data approximately the manner, however, following Wyden's letter, it has now updated its transparency document to "element these forms of requests" in a separate phase on push notifications. Cupertino's law enforcement suggestions now notice that push notification data "can be received with a subpoena or extra felony technique."

Google said it become devoted to maintaining users informed approximately those requests. "We had been the primary foremost enterprise to submit a public transparency report sharing the wide variety and kinds of authorities requests for consumer statistics we receive, together with the requests stated via Senator Wyden," Google stated in a statement.

It's uncertain which foreign governments have been soliciting for the push notification metadata from Apple and Google and for a way long. Reuters' supply describes them as "democracies allied" to the United States.